After an exciting cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Bridge’ that made us question who was dead or alive and a brief holiday hiatus, ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ finally returns with some answers to the questions that we’ve all been asking since the beginning of ABC’s Marvel show. And it seems that no one is more excited to finally get to the bottom of all this than Agent Phil Coulson himself.

In a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, Clark Gregg spoke about a number of things concerning his beloved character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the many secrets surrounding him, and the future of Coulson, his team, and S.H.I.E.L.D. in general. Gregg started out by assuring the fans that we will finally uncover some highly sought after information in tonight’s episode:

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. People have been really patient. Phil Coulson’s been really patient. I might add Clark Gregg’s been damn patient. [Laughs] I had a lot of mysterious stuff spelled out for me when I was told about this job. I loved the basic premise that played out in the pilot that he has a comparatively innocuous story that he believes about this near-miss that he experienced, dead-for-eight-seconds version. And there’s a darker secret as to how he was brought back to life, but to be in the middle of it and just be a tiny bit further ahead than the actual audience, I’ve been really really getting anxious to get more information, to really find out what’s driving him, why the people who’ve known him longest say that he’s different, how is he different? [It's] something that’s not just some secret medical practice but something that’s mysterious, big enough, dark enough, and integral enough to the plans of the nefarious Centipede organization that they pulled a swap and let Mike Peterson go in order to kidnap Agent Coulson to find out what really happened in ‘Tahiti’.”

After expressing his excitement over all the seemingly standalone episodes being connected in some way, Gregg says that Coulson and the audience aren’t exactly going to get some piece of mind once the mystery behind Coulson’s death is revealed:

“If you love these stories, if you love comics, if you love sci-fi, if you like this kind of stuff, to me, it’s perfect. It’s just perfect. It’s all the things I kind of hoped. It’s just out there and dark enough that to me it’s very satisfying. It just feels worth waiting for. And at the same time I wouldn’t want it to have a finality that made me go, ‘What’s the point of continuing?’ I think people are going to be, ‘I knew it! Oh my God!’ or ‘I never saw that coming!’ But at the same time, it opens up such an array of questions about who you can trust, and also about how much of what we’ve seen is deeply part of, it’s all connected, it’s all part of this vast conspiracy being run by Centipede that connects to S.H.I.E.L.D. and it probably ties us into the cinematic universe in some very groundbreaking ways.”

Despite things being as hectic as ever on this show, Gregg says in another interview with Zap2it that all the twists and turns are all worth it in the end:

“We’re going to get a big fat window at the real truth, and it’s going to be very, very surprising. When I read the sequence, I just stopped and put the script down and went ‘Wow. That was worth waiting for’. The fact that they’ve already managed to kind of make the reveal of what Coulson’s doing alive [be] the one thing that the Clairvoyant wants is just part of the way the back half of this season is going to be — more exciting and more satisfying than the first half of this season, where so much work had to be done to kind of set up this world of these people and this team, and all these separate pieces get kind of woven together.”

Are you excited to finally return to the world of ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ with tonight’s episode, ‘The Magical Place’? Do you think that all this build up in the first part of the season will be worth the wait? Share your thoughts in the comments below.